this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Worked for a public library in the U.S.
It was eye-opening and soul crushing how many people were there just because the government/insurance/medical/legal/whatever was forcing them to fax pages.
What's more hilarious is that faxes are only in black and white...and these jokers would demand faxed IDs and licenses...and then complain when all the pretty-pretty reflective anti-counterfeit layers resulted in a mostly black blob rectangle.
We had to use some scanner that basically "e-faxed" it anyway. It took a long time per page, charged $1/per, BTW, and after it connected to a kind of "courier server" it would attempt to establish the phone line connection.
This would routinely time out and require you to hit "retry" before it just closed and erased everything you just did.
Even then, it would regularly encounter some random connection error and...close and erase everything you just did.
...Sending so many stupid faxes was a huge motivator behind quitting that clown show, among a million other things lol.